Deadstock

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX convergence

They had left the hoverlimo-with Nelson Soto still slumped down in the passenger's seat-behind at the warehouse, and taken Adrian Tableau's luxury helicar. So it was that Mr. Jones brought this craft down into the parking lot on the roof of Steward Gardens' A-Wing.

They disembarked from the vehicle, the chill wind up here making a streaming pennant of Yuki's long hair. Evening was falling, the sky deepening to blue, a background against which the kaleidoscope of city lights began to dazzle. Squinting against the wind, Tableau walked close to the edge of the roof and for a moment watched the traffic on distant Beaumonde Street as the first wave of office workers made their way home, leaving their more ambitious brethren to sit at their desks for a few hours longer. Tableau still resented their kind, despite his now greater success, just as much as when he had mugged them as a teenager. Because of his background, he trusted his security team of retired Blue War clones more than he did any of the office drones under his employ.

Mr. Smithee had gone to the door that gave access to the building's interior, prepared to use a skeleton key card to override the lock. But he turned to the others to announce, "It's already open."

Tableau looked down at the overgrown gardens that set the apartment building back from the street, the dead vines entwined through the metal trellises, the scum-filmed fountain in the center of the front walk. "Blasting haunted house," he murmured to himself, before joining Jones and Smithee, who flanked the sniffling teenage girl. He had a gun of his own under his expensive jacket, and he drew it from its holster before they passed through the rooftop doorway.

The little party descended to the third and top floor of A-Wing, emerging in a murky corridor behind the large room central to this level. Jones stepped forward to lead the way, his ray blaster held ready. Not the first time in his life he had taken point. They passed the elevators, turned a corner and found themselves looking down another dimly lit hallway, with numbered doorways on their right-the first of these being 36-A. On their left: two more widely spaced doors giving access to the room that comprised this floor's center. Tableau himself took Yuki by the arm now, and whispered harshly, "If you've walked me into a trap, you're going to be one sorry little girl."

"I didn't," Yuki sobbed. "Krimson told Caren this is where she is."

Smithee flicked his eyes about warily. The sounds of street traffic had been left behind them, entirely blocked out. A silence like deafness, incongruous to this city. Had he not known differently, the veteran might have believed he was deep beneath the earth, as when he had stalked through the tunnels in which the Ha Jiin had long stored their deceased. The same tunnels in which, during the Blue War, their living soldiers had hidden, popping up from concealed hatches in the jungle floor to attack like the reanimated and vengeful dead.

Jones was keeping his eye on the numbered apartment doors, but it was the nearer of the two doors on his left that opened, just a few feet ahead of him. He whirled, bringing up his pistol, as a figure walked stiffly out into the hallway.

The entity had the form of a man, but unfinished, with the barest suggestion of a nose and eye sockets-no true features other than the number 32-B etched into its forehead. It was gray-fleshed and without clothes. And it turned as if it had no awareness of Jones and his pointing gun whatsoever, shambling off in the direction of the elevators and stairwell.

"What the blast was that?" Tableau hissed after the thing had trudged past him. He felt Yuki crushing herself against his side, as if he might protect her. "I thought it was a ghost!" he said.

"A belf," Smithee whispered, recognizing the bio-engineered life form as something remotely like himself and Jones, though on another branch of the plastic evolutionary tree.

Jones moved closer to the open door and began to peek inside, immediately jerked back as another figure lurched out of the darkened room beyond. It brushed against his arm but again seemed unaware of or uninterested in his presence, following its brother down the hallway, identical except for the number 21-A that Jones had glimpsed on its forehead.

He ducked into the doorway once more, and this time could see that the room served as a miniature theater. On its screen, however, there was only a fizzing and crackling sea of static, which once or twice flashed an image that didn't quite solidify. Accompanying these flashes was a burst of sound that suggested a multitude of voices moaning or chanting all at once, but the static drowned them out again.

There were a few heads silhouetted against the screen. One of these last remaining audience members stood, turned awkwardly, and started walking toward the doorway. Jones stepped back to let the faceless being pass, and stagger off down the hallway in the same direction the other two had gone, disappearing around the corner as they had. For the third time they heard the metal stairwell door squeal open and bang shut.

"Let's see where they're going," Jones said, leading the party back the way they had come.

"If those things have done something to my daughter… " Tableau began, but he didn't complete the unthinkable thought.

The four of them descended to the ground floor, but there was one level lower than that. The basement. Mr. Jones hesitated, looking down into the stairwell. Had the three mannequin-like beings gone down there?

"I think we'd better stay up here," he said guardedly, straining his hearing toward the gloom below. The basement level emergency lighting was stuttering, nearly dead. "Fukuda will be coming to the front entrance."

"But if those things are down there, they might have my daughter," Tableau said, pressing close beside him. He held Yuki behind him by her wrist.

"When Fukuda gets here, maybe he can tell us where she is, specifically."

"He doesn't know!" Yuki spoke up.

Tableau looked back at her with his teeth clenched together. "What do you know about what he knows?"

"Daddy."

Tableau whipped his head around to peer down the stairwell again. "Krimson?" he blurted.

Jones looked at his employer, surprised.

"Krimson!" Tableau shouted. He started forward, but Jones blocked his way with his arm.

"Sir, what is it?"

"What is it? Didn't you hear her call to me?" "Your daughter?" "Yes-down there!" "No, sir, I didn't."

"Krimson!" he shouted again. "Are you down there?"

"Daddy."

A person, little more than a shadow, shuffled just barely into view at the bottom of the stairs. The person was shortish in stature, and had a feminine outline; she looked, in fact, like she wasn't wearing any clothes. She lifted her arms up toward them. Toward Adrian Tableau.

"Daddy."

This time even Jones heard the barest whisper of a teenage girl's voice in his head. Behind him, Yuki mewled; she'd felt the word scuttle across her brain like a centipede, as well.

Tableau lurched against Jones's arm, but he grabbed onto his employer and held him back more forcefully. "Don't, sir."

"Let me go, you fuck!" Tableau raged. "That's her! It's Krimson!"

"It isn't," Jones said. "It isn't her."

The figure below them took several steps closer to the foot of the stairs, still extending its arms in a beseeching gesture. It had stepped into the faltering light. For a moment, the light almost kicked in at full force. It briefly reflected on smooth, gray flesh, and glistened on a long cord that trailed behind the figure, from the base of its spine like an immense tail that ran off into the darkness. The tail was striped in black and silver bands and slithered with a sideways motion of its own, as if it were the body of a giant snake. Or an immense tentacle, tethering the female figure to something unseen.

"Oh God," Tableau moaned, when he saw the apparition had no eyes, no mouth.

"What is that thing?" Smithee said, craning his neck to see over their shoulders. "What the hell is down there?"

With shocking speed, the figure lunged onto the steps, began running up them. Tableau was strong, but Jones was stronger; he flung the man aside to tumble across the floor. He then slammed the door shut, and Smithee threw himself at the metal surface just as Jones did. The two clones pressed their shoulders against it with all their weight.

Crouching beside Tableau, too terrified to attempt flight, Yuki screamed when she heard the thing on the other side of the door hurl itself against the metal. It banged a fist, or maybe even its head, against it repeatedly.

Lying on his back, Tableau let out a strangled scream of his own and clutched his head, which was filled to bursting with the word, "Daddy… Daddy… Daddy… Daddy… Daddy…"

"Open the door," Smithee barked at Jones. "We've got to shoot it!"

"No, no, don't!" Tableau cried out.

"It isn't her!"

"It is. It's part of her, part of her, inside something else," Tableau sobbed. Blood started to trickle from his nostrils. He thought the seams of his skull were spreading apart.

Then suddenly there was no more pounding. No more wailing in a familiar voice inside their heads. The presence had withdrawn. But for the moment the two security men kept themselves pressed to the door, not trusting the silence.

"Krimson," Tableau groaned, still lying on the floor despite the voice having left his skull. "Krimson." The teasing manifestation of his daughter, meant to convince him that she was still alive, now only confirmed to him in some mysterious and terrible way that Adrian Tableau's daughter was dead. Dead.

"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."