Deadstock

CHAPTER TWO steward gardens

The nine members of the Folger Street Snarlers ascended from the subway station at Oval Square, bumping elbows with other pedestrians and glaring into faces, puffed up and bristling, because they had come in search of their missing brother. Brat Gentile.

They split up into three groups of three, so as to spread out and cover as much ground as they could, not knowing precisely where Brat may have gone yesterday-knowing only that he had been headed for Beaumonde Square because he had asked Clara, his once-girlfriend, and his two best friends, Hollis and Mott, to accompany him there to help look for his current girl, whom he apparently felt was to be found there. These three friends had banded together in their search for him now. They all three experienced an unpleasant mix of guilt and, knowing something bad might have happened to him, shameful relief that they had not joined him yesterday. But whatever the risks, they had to find him now. Still, they felt better knowing that they were here in numbers, and fully armed inside their lumpy white leather jackets.

Hollis was black, with white Maori-style tattoos on his face, and wearing a purple rubber swimming cap. Mott was a Choom, Oasis's dominant native race, human in all regards except for a mouth that sliced back to both ears, his jaw heavy with multiple rows of molars. Instead of a swimming cap, and instead of the crew cut most Choom males favored, he wore his hair plaited into tight braids clinking with red glass beads and little polished ornaments carved from bone. Clara was pretty in a sneering and surly way, her long curly hair dyed a metallic crimson, and as one of the Snarlers she was just as quick with a gun or knife as her two comrades.

They sauntered ferally through the length of Quidd's Market, pausing here and there just long enough to buy some meat on a stick or little white bags of exotic candy. As they continued on, Mott bit into a chocolate, saw that its center consisted of live bluish grubs, and tossed his own little white bag into the next trash zapper he came to. There was barely a hiss as the bag of candy was disintegrated.

Hollis laughed, slapped him on the back, and proffered his own bag of candy.

"Stop playing, you stupid dung-dongs," Clara chided them. She was scanning every face behind every one of the counters, swiveling her head from left to right and back again, as if to intimidate one of these people into giving away a suspicious mannerism. She had disentangled herself from Brat romantically within the past year. He was just too childish, too insecure, monumentally irritated with each slight real or imagined, but she had never wanted anything bad to happen to him. She still had feelings for him, and this situation stirred up an eddy of bittersweet memories.

They were just emerging from the end of Quidd's Market, into the brisk late autumn air, when Hollis's hand phone beeped. He slipped it out of his leather jacket's pocket, and saw the leader of the Folger Street Snarlers, Javier, on its tiny screen.

"We found something," Javier said grimly. "Where are you?"

"We just came out of Quidd's Market."

"Good. We're right down the street from you. Come to an old apartment building called Steward Gardens. You can't miss it."

Javier Dias was wiry, tightly wound, with a pompadour of curly black hair he never hid under a swimming cap, and he talked out of one side of his mouth and through gritted teeth in an effect that seemed as much like partial paralysis as it did toughness. At twenty-five, he was overripe for a gang leader, like an alpha lion getting too aged to master its pride, but no younger male would try to supplant him. It didn't usually work that way. Usually, a maturing gang leader might try to get in with one of the big crime syndys. Or he or she might even settle down, get a legit job, like Brat Gentile's own brother Theo had a few years ago.

Theo had been a Snarler himself, up until then. Theo was married now, with a decent occupation, and a year younger than Javier. Well, often a gang leader wouldn't live much longer than twenty-five to have to worry about plotting long-term goals.

When Clara, Hollis, and Mott had joined him, he pointed to the last apartment door on the right-hand side, ground floor, of the building the sign out front had labeled Steward Gardens. There was a silver 12-B against the black metal, but besides that they could see an insignia in glowing green paint on the door, partially covered over with their own gang insignia in red paint: a stylized dog's head baring its fangs.

"What's that sign he covered?" asked Big Meat, another member of their band. All nine of them had converged at this spot. "Another gang?"

"They probably saw him painting over it, and jumped him," said Mott, through clenched rows of molars grating against each other menacingly.

"A gang tough enough to jump one of ours, here in Beaumonde Square?" Big Meat said.

"Hey, there are gangs everywhere. This is Punktown," Javier said.

"Brat did this, too." It was Clara. She was pointing toward the groin of a life-sized but oddly incomplete-looking gray statue standing in an arched nook beside the door. There was one of these statues standing between each of the apartment doors here, but this was the only one with a big red penis painted on its crotch.

"What's that smell?" Mott asked. Then his eyes went wide. "That isn't…"

"Follow me," Javier commanded.

At the back of the building, he led them toward a large rusting trash zapper with a red-glowing function bulb on its side. Clara cupped a hand over her lower face. "Oh God," she moaned, when she saw a mound of leaves beside the zapper. The rotting stench emanated from there.

Javier kicked through the leaves, and a dead pig-hen tumbled toward them, flopping and broken. "It's these. A lot of them. But we thought it was him, too, so we came back here to look. When I poked in the leaves, I found this." From out of his pocket, their leader produced a semiautomatic pistol, small but mean looking. "This is Brat's gun. I know-I gave it to him for his birthday a couple years ago."

"It is," Clara hissed, staring at the weapon. "It is his."

"Someone got him. someone got him." Hollis began pacing back and forth furiously, scuffing up leaves. He inadvertently uncovered a dead pig-hen himself and his boot sent it into mock flight.

A small creature like a monkey had been clinging to Big Meat's shoulder all this while. He was Tiny Meat. They were brothers that complemented each other symbiotically, working in conjunction like this on their own world. They had glossy helmet-like skulls, scarlet in color, but their faces were wrinkly masses of flesh like the caruncle of a turkey, as if badly sculpted out of raw hamburger. Their squinted eyes seemed lost in the heaped red tissue, but a long bone-white tube extended from the chaos by way of a nose. Due to his diminutive size, Tiny Meat's voice was high and squeaky, and as he shifted excitedly from one to the other of his sibling's shoulders, he said, "Look at this place-it's a fucking squatter's wet dream! If a gang jumped our boy, it's for sure they're holed up in here! We need to get inside and blast these fucking punks!" Tiny Meat had a vicious temper and was not to be messed with; even his big brother was cowed by his anger at times.

"T.M.'s right," Javier said, running his eyes over the surface of the building. "This place is derelict; it's gotta be filled with squatters, Beaumonde or not. Maybe that rich bitch Smirk is posing tough with another crew now. Wanted to impress them, and lured Brat here to set him up." He glanced at Clara. In her current regretful state of mind, he saw a flicker of pain cross her face at that particular scenario.

"So we're going in, right?" raged Tiny Meat.

"I don't wanna try the front door just yet," Javier mused. "Too much in view of the street. We'll try other ways first." He nodded. "But yeah. We're going in." He motioned for his people to spread out and approach the three service doors, apparently used by the building's staff back here at the rear of the building. He approached one of them himself, and tapped at the keyboard set into the wall beside it. "I don't wanna set off no alarms," he murmured.

"Look out," Tiny Meat snapped at Hollis, who was examining another door's control strip.

Hollis could tell by the eye-watering, ammonialike smell wafting out of Tiny Meat's snout that he was getting ready to jet his corrosive bile from that bone nozzle. He backed off fast and started to protest, but in his blubbery wet voice Big Meat expressed Hollis's concerns first. "Don't! You'll just fry the thing and jam it for good!"

"Hold on, don't get excited, scrotum-face. let me try my skeleton card," said another member of the Snarlers, a girl of Vietnamese heritage named Nhu, her long black hair flowing in a ponytail out a hole cut in the back of her lime-green swimming cap. She was reaching into her white leather jacket. It looked child-sized, to go with her miniature frame; only Tiny Meat's jacket was smaller.

"Who are you calling scrotum-face? Me or him?" he huffed.

"Both of you."

Javier hissed over at them, "All of you quiet the fuck down. If there is a gang inside, you want them to hear us coming and arm themselves up?" No doubt anticipating the possibility, he still gripped Brat's pistol in his right hand. He nodded at Nhu. "Try that card."

Using her home computer system, acquired under dubious circumstances, Nhu had impregnated a blank data card with hundreds of thousands of randomly generated key codes. There was a card strip in the keyboard unit, and Nhu swiped her card through it several times, flipped the card over, tried it again, tapped a button or two, gave a few final swipes-all to no avail. She shook her head at Javier.

"Let me try something," said Patryk, a very tall and pale youth with a crew cut and bland features. He was the most solemn and silent member of the Snarlers; his family had been forced to relocate to Folger Street when his parents were laid off from their jobs, replaced at the plant where they both worked by automatonic laborers. He always carried a backpack, and he slung this off his shoulder, extracted a pair of black rubber goggles with dark red lenses that his father had once used in his work. He fitted them onto his head. Javier and then the others followed him around the corner of the building, treading more quietly across the crunchy leaves now, back to that door where they had found their familiar insignia superimposed over an unfamiliar one. Patryk pressed his forehead right up against the glass of the last window in the wall.

"If this glass is one-way," whispered Tabeth, the final member of their group, a tall and solidly-built black girl with a pretty face and hair slicked close to her skull, "someone can shoot you right in the face, Pat, and you wouldn't see it coming."

"Nice apartments like these got weapon-proof glass," Javier told her, watching Patryk work. "But Pat, even if you get us into one apartment, that doesn't get us into the rest of the building."

"Maybe," he murmured, as he adjusted a knob on the frame of the goggles cupped over his eyes. So far, his artificial vision couldn't penetrate through the opaque-tinted glass. "But sometimes these upscale apartments have two means of exit for insurance reasons, in case of a fire or something else dangerous-like home invasion. One door leading outside, and one door leading into the rest of the building."

Patryk touched a keypad on the goggles, and suddenly it was as though a light, albeit a dim one, went on in the room beyond the glass. It was a gray, smoky, watery view. A smallish bedroom, maybe, but it was hard to tell from the absence of furnishings. He could see an open doorway on the opposite side of the room, maybe leading into a living room. He was reaching to adjust another small knob when a pale smudge passed across that dark, open threshold. He flinched, almost withdrew his face from the glass. It had only been a blink, but had that been a person?

Javier's sharp eyes had caught the tensing of his body. "What?"

"I don't know. Hold on." Patryk focused his goggles until, at last, the features of the room became sharply delineated. On the same wall as that doorway he saw the only piece of furniture: a built-in vanity unit with a large mirror. Shifting his position slightly, he concentrated on the mirror. He could see himself in the glass; the window he peered through was reflected, and it was indeed a one-way view. But more importantly, at the base of the window's sill he could see a little strip with a series of buttons. Patryk smiled thinly. He touched another keypad, and then a single purple ray pierced through the black window into the room, projected by a tiny lens on the goggles. He moved his head, until the beam struck the mirror. It bent sharply back in his direction, reflected off the silvered glass. By angling his head further, he inched the refracted beam toward the buttons directly below him, beneath the window's sill. Finally, he aligned the beam with one of the rubber buttons, and then he thumbed a little notched wheel set into the goggles, increasing the intensity of the ray until the purple light was almost a nonluminous black; almost a solid black rod.

With a little whisper, as of escaping sealed air, the window slid upwards. They were in.

"I got point," Hollis hissed, pulling a large handgun out of its holster beneath his jacket. He started to slip past Javier. Javier almost grabbed his arm to stop him, not liking that Hollis hadn't waited for him to give his orders, but decided to let him go. Brat had been Hollis's close friend. And why take point himself if someone else was chomping at the bit? But Javier held his gun ready to cover the black man as he pulled himself through the open portal.

"Careful," Patryk whispered urgently, "I thought I saw somebody inside."

"I'll take care of that," Hollis said ominously.

"It might be Brat!" Javier reminded him. He climbed through next. Mott was a close third, and the others all followed, Patryk bringing up the rear. As soon as he was through, he unholstered his own gun as the others had-all except Tiny Meat, who didn't use a gun, though they could smell the sharp chemical bite of his rising bile.

Satisfied that the last of his friends was now inside, Hollis moved to the open doorway across the room, pistol held ready.

"Moron," Javier barely uttered under his breath. He motioned for Patryk to hasten and cover Hollis. Patryk nodded, flicking a switch on the goggles he still wore to avail himself of their basic night vision function. Only he would be able to see clearly into the murk beyond this room, but that hadn't stopped Hollis from approaching the threshold and peeking around its edge.

Hollis's black market firearm was a Scimitar .55, an expensive semiautomatic, silvery glitter sparkling across its dark purple enameled body. It had an internal silencing feature. The gun that killed Hollis did not. A crude revolver, its thunder in these dead rooms like a detonation inside the head of every one of the Snarlers. But it was only Hollis who was actually struck by its lead projectile. The bullet smashed a sizable chunk out of the right side of his tattooed face, taking one peeking eye with it. His body slumped back almost gently, folded to the floor, and Patryk jumped over it as he took Hollis's place.

"Blast!" screamed dreadlocked Mott, surging forward with his own gun ready. "Blasting fuckers!"

"Mott, keep back!" Javier roared.

But Mott had learned a little from his friend's death, and plastered himself to the wall behind Patryk, ready to follow him into the next room should Javier give the word.

"Oh God… oh my God," whimpered Clara, backing toward the open window they had clambered through only moments earlier. Despite having a gun of her own in hand, she wanted to flee right now-even if it meant abandoning her friends in the face of great danger-but she was more afraid of incurring Javier's anger than that of whoever was lurking in the gloom beyond that doorway.

"Who is out there?" called a muffled voice from within the next room.

"We're here to kill you, you motherblasting fuck!" Mott bellowed, with eyes bulging.

"Mott, shut it!" Javier snapped. He edged closer to Patryk, and called over his shoulder, "Who are you?"

"Don't shoot, okay?" the voice replied. It sounded strangely distorted. "I'm sorry."

"You're sorry? You're fucking sorry? You killed our friend!" Mott yelled.

"I said shut it," Javier told him. He again addressed the voice in the darkness. "I asked you who you are!"

"We're squatters here. We came in to squat. Please, please don't shoot! I didn't mean to kill your friend. I thought he was one of those things."

"What things?" Javier demanded.

"The Blank People."

"What fucking Blank People?"

They all heard Clara scream. They all turned. They all saw her being pulled backwards out the open window they had climbed through, by two pairs of gray arms.

And then she was gone, and then her screams really began.