Deadstock

PROLOGUE trash

There were neighborhoods in the city of Paxton where the police did not readily go-if at all. Tin Town, for instance, or Warehouse Way; the former given over mostly to mutants and the latter to squatters in its nominal disused warehouses. Sometimes fires in such regions were even left to burn themselves out, despite the fact that the city firefighting units were mostly automated in nature.

Beaumonde Square, however, was not one of these shunned sectors of Punktown, as the megalopolis had come to be known over the years since Earth colonists had built it upon the humble foundation of the native Choom city that preceded it, like a great cathedral atop an ancient pagan altar.

No, Beaumonde Square was one of the more affluent areas of the city. In its environs were Paxton University and the Beaumonde Women's College. There were plazas and narrow streets either retaining the cobblestones of the original Choom lanes, or replicating that quaint effect. Neatly spaced trees fronted rows of upscale shops, as did stone benches upon which to sip one's cappuccino. There was Quidd's Market, with its countless booths offering food from a cross-section of Punktown's many sentient species, human in aspect or otherwise. The mall-like structure's central rotunda was meant to represent this planet Oasis, raised in an invitation to the first colonists, and to lure them to the market to do business. Money had paved the streets of Beaumonde Square as surely as its cobblestones, from the start.

But even the sorriest of Punktown's citizens who had legs to walk with could plant their feet on those cobblestones. Law enforcers-or forcers, as they were simply called-did not shy from this nexus of streets, and rousted as many troublemakers as they could, but the crime in Punktown was of legendary proportions. Its war zones often chased their inhabitants out into the less anarchic sectors, the way over-development had once sent coyotes, deer, and bears into suburban neighborhoods on Earth (back when there had been such animals, outside of zoos). Of course, many times it wasn't that these blighted people were fleeing a portion of the city gone so rotten as to be all but unlivable. Sometimes they were merely curious; daring explorers, like those first Earth colonists. But even they had been likened by some to the initial cells of a cancer.

Brat Gentile had taken the Red Line to Blue Station, and the Blue Line to Oval Square. From there, he had gone up to street level, and soon found himself on Beaumonde Street itself.

Despite having bought his white leather jacket only a month earlier, he gazed longingly into shop windows at automatonic mannequins as they struck a succession of programmed poses in even more updated varieties of this popular style. But admiring these items of clothing, Brat had to snort in disgusted amusement. So the youths of Beaumonde Square were trying to look like gang kids, huh? Wearing cloned leather jackets like these, and trendy rubber swimming caps on their heads like the pink cap Brat wore, and using the gangstyle lingo. To him, they were like a local moth he had seen in a VT program, which had spots and markings on its abdomen to imitate the face of a snake.

Then again, his resentment toward the more advantaged citizens of Punktown, seemingly instilled in his very cells since birth, had been tempered in recent months by his relationship with Smirk. Smirk, as he had nicknamed her, didn't live in Beaumonde Square herself, but her family could have if they'd cared to. That she had come into his life, and fallen in love with him… him… still amazed him to the point of confusion.

But that she had now disappeared confused him even more.

He wandered more or less aimlessly, letting the last of his anger drain from him. He had asked his two best friends from the Folger Street Snarlers to accompany him in his exploration this afternoon, but they had made their vague excuses. They didn't care for Smirk: distrustful, because of her money. They'd hinted that she was just playing at being dangerous, wearing him on her arm like these uptown kids wore their gangstyle fashion. Well, Brat suspected his friends were secretly envious of his golden girl, too. Finally he had even asked his ex-girlfriend, Clara, to join him on this excursion, but she claimed to be babysitting her sister's kids today. He had doubts about that excuse, of course. Why should she want to help him find his current girlfriend? But to Brat, she should think of him as a fellow gang member first, and a former boyfriend second. So much for the loyalty of friends. Fuck them. All gang affiliations aside, Brat had no problem going solo when he had to. Sometimes he even preferred it that way. Yeah. Like a shark, on one of the nature programs he and his brother Theo had enjoyed as boys and still liked to watch together in the apartment they shared with Theo's wife. He didn't doubt that Theo would have joined him today, but he and his wife were off in the city of Miniosis for a while, staying with her family. Over the phone, he had told his brother about Smirk and Theo had been concerned, so Brat knew Theo wouldn't have let him down like his friends had.

In all fairness, though, he had to admit that it would have helped if he'd been less vague with them about Smirk's disappearance. But then it was vague enough, still, to him.

Brat went into one end of Quidd's Market and came out the other end with his fingers greasy from a bag of fried dilky roots he'd polished off, an ice cream cone now in his fist. His mission hadn't blotted his sense of curiosity, nor his hunger. He still had the ice cream in hand and was beginning to gnaw the cone itself when his wandering legs finally brought him to Steward Gardens.

That was the name given on the large plaque outside the structure, its letters deeply recessed into a slate-gray background, like an epitaph carved on a tomb: STEWARD GARDENS.

"Huh!" Brat said as if in surprise, though he had come here in search of a place by that name. As if he hadn't truly expected to find it. As if this place-and Smirk's voice on the phone-had only been figments of a dream.

"I'll be at Steward Gardens," she had said to him, her voice all but lost in a storm of static. "He'll bring me. Steward Gardens."

He had shouted into the phone, pleaded for more, but there was only the static after that. He? Who was he? Someone who had kidnapped her? When the chill had left Brat's flesh, he'd had the notion to turn on his comp and look up Steward Gardens on the net. He hadn't found much, but he had learned its whereabouts. Beaumonde Street.

Now that he had in fact located the place, he didn't know what to make of it.

Punktown was filled from one border to the other with as many diverse buildings as it was varieties of intelligent beings. There were certainly far more unusual, inventive edifices in this city. For instance, he liked to stare at the exterior walls of the library on the subterranean or B Level of Folger Street, into which were set sizable aquarium tanks swarming with jellyfish from a number of planets (an especially mesmerizing sight when he was high on purple vortex). A skyscraper one could see from the upper level of Folger Street was lit at its summit with a flickering green flame, like a titanic candle, though he didn't know whether the flame was fed by gas or merely holographic.

This building was less showy, more somber. Still, it held his eye and made him run his gaze over its surface, into its more shadowy corners and creases. He found himself drifting nearer as he unconsciously nibbled his cone. How much should he search for her now? How wary should he be of kidnappers? She'd be here, she'd said. But not yet?

He walked up the front path, through what passed for the gardens. These front grounds, which set the building itself back from the street, had once been landscaped with flower beds and shrubbery, and there were even trellises made from black wrought iron that enclosed metal benches, spaced along the sides of the front walk. But the flowers had wilted and decayed, the shrubbery was bristling into chaos with dead leaves snagged in its branches like the husks of flies in a spider-web, and the vines interwoven through the iron trellises were brittle and leafless. The grass was in need of trimming, but looked matted down and yellow, except where the flotsam and jetsam of colorful trash had blown onto the lawn.

Still, for Brat, whose neighborhood of Folger Street's B Level was lucky to see a weed teased from a crack in the sidewalk by the artificial lighting, this aspect of Steward Gardens alone was enough to capture his attention. It was even a little disorienting, like venturing into a verdant jungle with a mysterious ruined temple secreted in its depths.

The wide front walk branched off into little strolling paths, and in the center of the walk, not far from the front doors, was a circular pool that had once been a fountain. Now the water was oily looking and black in the spaces that showed through its epidermis of fallen leaves. With its vile stink, he figured the water was probably full of algae. He knew about algae from VT, too.

From the edge of this basin, prodding the water with a gnarled stick he'd picked up, Brat again lifted his eyes to the structure itself.

Two wings of three floors each flanked a lower central section, no doubt a lobby, though he couldn't see through the opaque black glass of the front doors (or were they clear, and the lobby unlit?). What it lacked in height it made up for in its sprawl. Along the fronts and sides of the two wings ran three levels of covered balconies that gave access to rows of black metal doors. The surface material of the building proper was the same dark slate-gray color as the plaque that had told him the place's name.

Maybe a hotel, but more likely an apartment complex, he guessed. Its three areas of roof were flat, and likely provided parking spaces for heli-cars, though from here he couldn't see any. There was a parking lot to the right of the building, which curved around behind it, but this was vacant as far as he could tell.

Intending to break off onto one of the branching lesser paths, Brat first tossed the remnant of his cone into the fountain pool. The disturbance caused the water to bob and he noticed an object floating on the surface. He poked it with the stick he still held. It was a decomposing bird, its remaining metallic blue feathers identifying it as a species nicknamed a pig-hen, which made itself a pest in the city, speckling statues and tripping up pedestrians, snuffling about for morsels of food with little tapir-like snouts. Now he understood the source of the fountain's stench.

Brat skirted close to the edge of the building, but he still couldn't see through its windows. He figured they had all been adjusted to an opaque tint or else they were one-way, protecting the privacy of the apartment-dwellers. He glanced over his shoulder at the hovercars riding low along the road in front of the building, but they were safely distant and traveling quickly, so he squeezed between two hedges to vault over the wall of the ground floor walkway, which corresponded with the two balconies above it. As he passed them, he saw that the black metal doors spaced along the smooth gray wall (was it concrete? ceramic?) were marked with silver numbers.

He moved toward the rear of the building, and as he had suspected he found this arm of the parking lot empty, too. So this building had been abandoned, then. Shut down. After all, it certainly didn't look brand new, yet to be opened, from the condition of the grounds. What had happened? Another bankruptcy? Even with the depression over, businesses and stores folded in great numbers yearly and half the factories of the city had closed shop over the past two decades, so he supposed it must be the same with apartment complexes, too. Wherever there was money to be made, there was money to be lost.

An abandoned building would be a great place for a kidnapper to bring a girl. But it might also be a great place for a girl to send her boyfriend, if she were playing games with him. She was definitely a bit of a devil, this Smirk. Could her disappearance only be that? And she had left her phone behind on purpose, so that she might spook him by calling him on it? Making him think that she was kidnapped or, worse, already dead-it being one of those Ouija phone gadgets? Not that he knew much about them.

If she wasn't dead, and this turned out to be a game, he'd make sure she wished she was dead by the time he was done with her.

There was one unique feature about the building, after all, but from a distance its bland general shape and sullen color had detracted from the effect. Now Brat was right on top of this detail, could reach out and touch it. Between each and every black door, on all three stories of both wings, there was a niche recessed in the exterior wall. A niche with a bullet-shaped top. And standing in each niche was a statue of that same slate-gray hue. They were stylized human figures with barely defined features and rudimentary limbs, standing straight like soldiers ranked at attention. They reminded Brat of pictures he had seen of the outdated motion picture award called the Oscar, minus the sword. They might have been considered Art Deco in style, but that term he wasn't familiar with.

He wondered how many there were, but since there was one between every apartment door, he assumed there was one figure to every apartment.

Had the former occupants felt safe at night with these nearly faceless sentinels standing guard outside, like cold suits of armor? Now, they resembled nothing so much as an army of men fossilized right into the structure's hide.

Brat imagined that these statues were the former inhabitants. That unwelcome little fancy gave him a shiver.

At the back of the building-the middle section, with its lower roof-he saw a very large trash zap-per unit, its sides caked with streaks of corrosion and refuse. Its mechanized arms were retracted and folded in repose, and the red bulb glowing on its side indicated that it was not currently digesting a meal; it might not even be functional anymore. There were a few doors back here at ground level, no doubt for maintenance crews to use. The litter about was dense, as were the piles of leaves. This was where the wind deposited most its treasures.

Brat returned his attention to the wall beside him, at the end of the walkway. The balconies did not extend to the rear of the building; there were no rear windows either, no doors other than those for apparent service access. This last apartment door beside him had some unfamiliar insignia spray-painted on it in glowing green pigment. It resembled the warning sign for radioactivity, with three Ts in its center. A local gang? If so, he wasn't familiar with it. He made that snorting amused sound again. Some Beaumonde Square gang. The kids of wealthy families, emulating the kids of poor and struggling families. Healthy kids emulating junkies and muggers. That old disdain arose in Brat, and he dug inside his white leather jacket.

Not for the gun he always carried, of course, but for his own tube of highly concentrated spray paint. Except that his color was red-an angry, fiery, blood red.

Over that luminous green insignia he sprayed the insignia of the Folger Street Snarlers. Then, for good measure, he sprayed an erect red penis on the gray statue that stood between the last two doors on this side. It made him snicker. Looking up into its eyeless face, for the first time he noticed a number was etched into the forehead. 12-B. It corresponded with the last door's number.

Let Smirk see his handiwork and guess that he'd been here. If she wasn't already watching him from inside. He was more convinced by the second that she was toying with him. He was glad now that his friends hadn't helped him check this place out. And he had to concede that he'd often had the same doubts about Smirk that they held. Sooner or later she had been bound to tire of her feral pet. Had that time come now?

Brat emerged from under the walkway's canopy and floated toward that trash zapper. Its flank was crying out for him to paint some message for Smirk or at least a larger version of his gang insignia there. But that was not bold enough. Why not use all this wasted blank space at the back of the building itself? He smiled and approached the wall, but stepped on something lumpy and soft in the bed of washed-up leaves. Looking down, he brushed them aside with the side of his shoe, then hissed a profanity, backing off immediately. Again, he had been fooled about the stink he smelled, assuming it came from the trash zapper.

The leaves at his feet hid the bodies of dead pig-hens; heaps of them. And all of them looked crushed or mutilated in some way. One might have thought a cat had killed each one, and left them here as a tribute to its owner. But it would have taken an army of cats to deposit this many bird corpses here. Had someone shot them, and meant to zap them in the machine, but upon finding it inoperative simply dumped them on the ground instead?

Brat left the mound of dead birds, moved around to the opposite side of the trash zapper. The leaves on the ground were thinner here and he saw only a half dozen of the dead pig-hens, easier to step around. He kicked one out of his way as he approached a nice expanse of wall begging for his paint as a blackboard begs for chalk.

Allowing his artistic impulses to guide his hand, across the gray surface he sprayed a life-sized figure, like a blueprint for another of those statues, but with one arm raised in an obscene gesture. He chuckled. There were no features yet inside the head's outline. Well, the last door was 12-B, so why not paint a 13 on this figure's forehead? He was about to accomplish this, when a crunching sound distracted him and caused him to turn about quickly.

A crunching sound like feet crushing dead leaves.

The briefest flash of a figure, darting behind the opposite side of the trash zapper.

Brat became mindful of the handgun holstered under his jacket. He eased himself one stealthy step forward, leaning ahead so as to peer around the body of the disposal machine. If it was the member of some Beaumonde Square gang, with his pretty green paint and a white leather jacket his Mom had bought for him, and he was trying to defend his territory from this stray outsider, he was in for a real education in gang behavior. Or if this was a kidnapper, or even Smirk, they were in for some harsh brand of punishment, too.

While Brat was straining his hearing forward, another sound came from behind him. A metallic squealing sound. Loud, rasping, screeching. He whirled to confront it, his hand darting for his pistol, in time to see the great mechanical talons a second before they seized him in their grip.

Brat was lifted into the air and squeezed at the same time. The breath was jetted out of his lungs. Though his quick hand had slipped out his pistol, his arm was crushed against his chest and the weapon dropped from his fingers into the leaves below.

Kicking his legs, unable to cry out, Brat looked down and saw three things in the final moments of his young life.

He saw the cover of the trash zapper slide open with a grating noise. He saw the green bulb on its side come on instead of the red.

And in wildly looking around for help, as the mechanical arm lowered him toward that humming maw, he saw that a person was standing near the edge of the building, watching him calmly and making no effort to come forward and shut the zapper down.

A person with a huge red phallus painted on his front.