Deadstock

CHAPTER 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 terracotta 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 on 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 apartment 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 seance 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 described. 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.

And yet, as if to distract him from that great destiny, as if to hold him back, there was that echo growing more and more familiar with each reverberation. He could not hate it, however much it impeded him. In fact, it inspired a perplexing emotion in him. A confusing yearning, as he heard the voice inside his mind say, "Please… why don't you try to talk to Krimson on a Ouija phone? Why don't you just ask her what happened?"

And he flinched-a quivering vibration that radiated throughout all his sprawling flesh like the ripples from a stone flung into a lake-when that same voice sobbed, "Please… don't!"

Suddenly, he not only heard the voice (mother, mother, mother's voice) but saw the speaker as well; through gauze or a fog, but he saw her. The sweet face that had once leaned over him, planted kisses on his chubby belly. His god. The god's god. And he saw other creatures, somewhat like her but different. He saw one of these creatures pointing an instrument at the mother-goddess. A hurting instrument, like that creature had fired into his belly in the city below the city, when he hadn t yet understood his hunger.

Mother.

Dai-oo-ika flexed his muscles again. Began to soften, so as to reach out further this time.

"You're unemployed now, Jones!" Stake shouted, as he struggled to get his legs under him. He only fell onto his back again, and a wave of grainy black static passed over his vision. His next comment, little more than a gurgle between his clenched teeth, barely carried across the lobby. "This is over!"

"I don t happen to like being unemployed, Corporal Stake," Jones called back, and he increased the pressure of the gun barrel inserted in James Fukuda s ear. He threw a quick look at Smithee, who still had his handgun trained on Yuki s beautiful face. "Maybe you d like to become unemployed, too, huh? I think that s only fa-"

The first beam, a blue so intense it left a brief afterimage on Stake s eyes, entered the rear of Mr. Jones s skull and emerged from his forehead, like a ray blazing from some mystical third eye.

The second blue beam went in one of Mr. Smithee s ears and came out the other, as if he were merely an insubstantial, holographic image in its path.

"Christ," Stake hissed, his eyes going from Jones to Smithee and back to Jones again, in time to see the security chief s own eyes roll up white and his body go slack, falling away from Fukuda like a marionette with its strings cut.

The gun flipped over in Smithee s hand, the trigger guard still looped around his finger, and swayed there a moment before it slid off and clunked to the floor. Black wisps curled out of both ears, and his nostrils besides. Then he crumpled and lay curled at Yuki s half-unshod feet.

Stake rolled onto his side in another effort to regain his footing, for an unthinking and instinctual moment desperate to reach the cover of the hallway again-expecting a third sapphire ray beam to come streaking his way next. And this person, whoever it was, was an even better shot than Smithee. This time he wouldn t get it in the side, but straight through the melon. Someone outside those open front doors; a damn good shot……a trained sniper…

Stake snapped his eyes at those open doors. His mind clicked into focus…an Earth Killer.

Despite his agony, and inspired by his intuition, Stake managed to get onto hands and knees, and from there shakily to his feet. One hand now pressed against the hole burned through him and the other lugged the Darwin, which felt much heavier than it was. His eyes were on the front doors as he began trudging toward James and Yuki Fukuda, but he saw no one outside in the darkness of falling night.

That cab, he thought. Number 23.

The sound that Jones s keen ears had heard out there.

"Thi," Stake whispered, staggering, trying to maintain consciousness.

Yuki rose from her chair as if invisible ropes that had bound her there now dropped away, severed. She stepped around Smithee s fetus-curled shape as James Fukuda rushed to her, and he seized her in a painfully tight embrace. Kissed the top of her head again and again.

"Daddy," she wept against his chest.

"Baby," he chanted, as if more to himself than to her. His own falling tears slid away into the midnight river of her silken hair. "Baby. My baby."

Stake saw them and held off from approaching any further, letting them have their moment. Despite being doubles, impostors, shadows of their true selves, their emotion was as real as anything he had seen or ever was likely to see. He envied them for it.

At last, Fukuda loosened his arms from around her, and smiled wearily over at Stake. He began to say something, but a look of concern came over him when he saw Stake weaving there unsteadily, his hand clamped to his side, his complexion almost gray. Fukuda s concern for the man was mixed with another disturbing emotion. He saw the barest reflection of his own features still clinging to the private investigator s countenance, as a result of their conversation over their vidphones.

"You re hurt," he said, taking a step toward him.

Fukuda s eyes were on Stake-on his brother s fading, possessing spirit-and Stake s eyes had turned again toward the open front doors, the camouflaging darkness of night. Was she watching him still? Watching over him?

Neither saw the silver/black-striped appendage until it had lashed out of the gloom and slapped itself around Yuki s waist. Her cry, however, quickly regained their attention.

None of them could understand what it was, at first; not the two men who saw it nor even the girl in its embrace. A gigantic python, coiled around her, was the first thought that came to Stake in his delirium. The great tentacle ran almost the full length of the lobby, from where it had emerged: the same hallway from which he himself had entered the lobby just a little bit earlier.

Then he recognized the silver and black bands on the appendage, though he had never seen the kawaii-doll itself before, only in pictures he d been shown. Stake understood, and was in awe. A god is owed awe.

The tentacle pulled Yuki backwards. It did not crush her delicate body. It did not lift her off her feet. But it was immensely strong, and insistent. She had to dance backwards to keep from being dragged on her heels. In starting toward Stake, Fukuda had let go of her, but he managed to leap forward and grasp one of her outflung arms. Father and daughter wailed to each other. For a few seconds, they were able to hold on to the other s hand.

An amorphous form began squeezing itself into the far end of the lobby, bulging through the narrow hallway entrance. A shapeless, gray and glossy mass. More and more ballooning out of the doorway. Fluid but weighty. The python-like extremity was rooted in it.

Yuki and her father only held on to the ends of each other s fingers, now. And then, their hands were torn away from each other. Fukuda howled, falling onto the floor with the momentum.

Stake leveled his gun past Yuki, at the mounding tissue that was oozing into the far end of the room. Steadying his aim with both hands, he fired shot after shot into it. Even in his lightheaded state, the thing was hard to miss, and every projectile found its mark. But were there even any organs to hit? Nerves to feel pain? The tumor-like flesh barely rippled. It leaked just the thinnest trickles of clear, viscous fluid before the holes closed up, disappeared.

Fukuda scrambled to his feet. Stake lowered the Darwin and rushed at his employer, as swiftly as his pain and dazedness would allow.

The serpentine arm retracted or shortened. It was withdrawing into that billowing storm cloud of raw flesh. Yuki was pulled back. back. arms reaching, mouth and eyes wide.

Stake collided with Fukuda, threw his arms around him, before he could charge at the creature. "Let me go!" Yuki's father protested.

Yuki was pulled back. back. until all of the arm but the coil around her waist had vanished into the gray flesh. Then, her body impacted against it, as if she had fallen onto the mass from high above, fallen into a pool. She broke the surface. A slow-motion sinking away into that pool s thick gray waters.

"Yuki!" her father called.

Her face with its wide beseeching eyes was swallowed. Just her slim arms now, her splayed fingers. Then they, too, submerged.

"We have to get out," Stake said in Fukuda s ear. "We have to get out of here."

"We have to save Yuki!"

"She s gone. It has her. And it will get us next."

He would come back here later, maybe with Pablo Fujiwara in tow, or at least armed with whatever advice Fujiwara could give him. Or perhaps he d even have to involve the authorities. The police or the Colonial Forces, of which he had once been a member. But for now, particularly in his current condition, there was nothing he could do but get his client safely out of this place.

Stake wrestled Fukuda toward the door. The Darwin fell from his hand in the struggle but he ignored it. The black static had lowered in a curtain over his vision again. He felt his arms around Fukuda weakening, slipping away.

Strong arms lifted Stake up again. Fukuda? Fukuda, coming to his senses and realizing that they had to get out. Fukuda dragging him backwards toward the open front doors.

Before he passed out, Jeremy Stake let his head fall back and stared at an upside-down face with blue skin and black eyes that flashed a laser red.