Deadstock

CHAPTER FOUR permutations

"Close the window, close the window-don't let them in!" cried the distorted voice from the room beyond this one.

"Clara!" Tabeth yelled, pulling a gun out from underneath her white leather jacket.

"Oh God!" Nhu blurted, jumping back from the window through which the four gray arms had dragged their friend and fellow Folger Street Snarler.

"Don't hit Clara!" their leader, Javier, barked as he saw Tabeth aim her pistol outside. He dashed forward to join her.

From the other room, the owner of the frantic voice rushed forward impulsively, a whitish blur in the murk. This was what Mott, still poised around the edge of the doorframe behind Patryk, had been waiting for. He reached around Patryk with his own handgun, and squeezed its trigger at the ghostly shape responsible for the death of his close friend, Hollis, who lay near his feet with blood coming in a tide from a head broken open like that of a doll.

Tabeth had begun firing outside only a microsecond before Mott opened up with his gun. Javier, caught between the two sounds, spun around toward the latter, thinking that the shots might be coming from the same person who had-acciden-tally, they claimed-killed Hollis. But he saw Mott's extended arm, his handgun bucking.

"Mott, hold your fuckin' fire!"

"I got him," Mott said, his Choom face a caricature of an insane grin. He lowered his gun as ordered, but he gloated, "I got that piece of dung!"

From the room beyond, terrible screams and confused shouts. Screams of pain from the one who'd been hit, or screams of despair from that person's comrades, whoever and however many they were.

From where she stood, though a bit removed from it, Nhu could see out the window. She could see what was happening to Clara. She shrieked. Her shriek dipped and rose again when she saw Clara's body flinch as it was inadvertently struck by one of Tabeth's projectiles. But considering what those two gray figures were doing to her, Clara had to be dead already. If not, then getting struck by Tabeth's bullet was a blessing.

"Oh. oh." Tabeth said, lowering her gun. Bile rose into her throat.

Big Meat had his gun pointed toward the window now, as he surged toward it with Tiny Meat clinging to him, Tiny Meat letting loose a fusillade of high-pitched obscenities. Big Meat pushed past Tabeth, who had gone into stunned mode at having hit Clara. At having seen those things tear Clara.

But Nhu was already darting back toward the window, into Big Meat's range of fire, and he barely checked his trigger finger. Tiny Meat barely checked the spray of acidic bile from the bone nozzle in his face. "Out of the way!" he screeched.

They could see the two gray entities-now gray and red-drop the thing that had been Clara, turn their heads in unison, and break into a sprint toward the open window. The way they were running, it appeared that they would dive straight through it, side by side, like two trained dogs through a hoop.

Nhu was good with anything technological, but her fingers froze a moment above the buttons on the sill, as if she had never encountered so simple a thing as the controls to raise or lower, tint or make opaque a window. A mad thought sprang into her head: what if the beam from Patryk's goggles had damaged the controls? Disabled them? What if the window wouldn't close?

Javier saw the gray things coming. Like Big Meat, he was pointing his gun out there but afraid to hit Nhu, and instead of moving forward to push her out of the way or aim past her, he commanded, "Close the window!"

The faceless beings had almost reached it. Though their smooth, abstracted bodies were devoid of muscular detail, Javier still saw in their body language that they were tensing themselves up to spring at any moment.

Nhu's index finger jabbed a button on the control strip. The window began to lower with the barest whisper.

One of the gray beings sprang. Then the other.

A thud against the safety pane. Palms spread across it with a splat like suction cups, first one pair and then the other. Palms that squealed down the surface, smearing red. The pane was still lowering. There was a gap at the bottom. One of the suction cups came off the window, flashed down and slipped under the lowering edge. A gray hand like a giant spider clawed at the air.

Big Meat lunged forward. Now he pushed Nhu out of the way. But it was Tiny Meat who jetted the groping hand with his bile, even as the edge of the window pinned the wrist against the sill. The gray flesh sizzled, bubbled. Dripped something clear instead of crimson. Fingers were reduced to nubs. There should have been bone inside those fingers, revealed by the acid. There wasn't.

Holding his breath against the strong chemical smell of Tiny Meat's bile, Javier rushed forward also now that Nhu was out of the way. Not waiting for Tiny Meat's bile to finish dissolving the hand, he pointed his gun at it and fired. The foaming blob splattered into chunks. Was gone. And the window completed its serene downward passage, meeting the sill and sealing. Locked. Glancing back to make sure her fellow gang members were done spitting and shooting, Nhu moved in and touched the button that activated an alarm on the window, should the things manage to force the pane open somehow with those three remaining, spread palms. She imagined, though could not hear, the squeaking sounds they made against it. She tried not to see the faceless faces behind those palms. Or the streaks of her friend's life fluid.

"It's still tinted one-way," she said numbly, straightening. "They can't see us."

"How do you know?" raged Tiny Meat. "Blasting things don't have eyes, anyway, but they saw Clara!"

Patryk and Mott hadn't left their post by the threshold to the next room. From the chaos of voices in there came a more articulate exclamation. It sounded female. "You killed our friend!"

"Sounds familiar, huh?" Mott shouted. "So now we're even!"

"Shut it," Javier growled. "Hey," he then called into the other room. "You said you're squatters. What the hell is going on here? Why are you fighting these 'Blank People?' I want answers, unless you wanna keep fighting us, too. And I don't think you want that!"

"You're the ones that wouldn't be wanting that!" an arrogant male voice bellowed in return. But the female voice overruled him.

"We'll come out and talk if you promise not to shoot. It was all an accident. We don't want any trouble with you-we just want to get out of this place!"

"So do we."

"Right. So we need to talk. Promise not to let your friends shoot."

"Then throw out your guns first!" Mott yelled. But it was Javier's gun, suddenly, that pressed hard under the Choom's heavy jaw.

The leader of the Snarlers did just that, through gritted teeth. "Are you trying to steal my job, wanker?"

Mott looked back at his friend from the corner of his eyes. "No, man, I just…"

"What do I got to do to get you to listen to me? Make that hole in your ear bigger? We're going to talk to these people. It sounds like those gray things have got them pinned down in here. And it looks like we're pinned down in here, too. We might just be on the same side."

"They probably killed Brat!"

"Don't be stupid. We found his gun outside- where those things are."

"We didn't kill your friend!" the female voice called. Javier was surprised; he hadn't thought they'd been discussing it loudly enough for her to hear. "He was outside. I didn't sense it until he started screaming. The trash zapper out there picked him up, and fed him inside. I heard him screaming inside my skull."

"What are you talking about?" Javier demanded.

"I have a gift."

"Mutants," Nhu whispered.

Javier lowered the gun from Mott's jaw, where it left a red indentation. "Let's talk. Come out. We'll keep our guns down if you do."

"Don't, Mira," that angry male voice rasped. But she wasn't listening to him. The female came out first, her arms raised above her head.

Arms as short as those of a small child.

"Mutants," Patryk echoed Nhu belatedly.

The first person to emerge from the darkened room, into this room where the surviving

Snarlers were clustered, was an adult woman in her mid-twenties compacted into a condensed form. A dwarf, with a normal-sized head and fairly normal-sized torso, but with chubby stunted limbs, her somewhat bowed legs giving her a waddle. Her hair was long and black, cinched in a messy ponytail, her dark eyes large and striking. Her clothing looked like it had been donated to a homeless shelter by a parent whose daughter had outgrown it: a pink T-shirt with a cute cartoon jellyfish on the front, outlined in flaking glitter, and white shorts. But the clothing was dirty and frayed, speckled with dark stains of old blood.

Had he only seen her face, Javier would have found the young woman very attractive, with those heavy-lidded eyes and her strong nose and full lips. But besides her dwarfism, there were also dark purple veins on both temples, running up into her hair, like tattoos of forked lightning. A gift, she had said she possessed.

"I'm Mira Cello," she told him, stopping in the center of the room. The Snarlers hadn't put their guns away but they didn't point them, either. For a moment, the only movement was the gray palms sliding down the windowpane, then moving back to the top again.

"I'm Javier Dias. This is my gang. What's left of it. The Folger Street Snarlers."

Mira glanced down at the body of Hollis, then away with a wince. Slowly she let her arms drop, having established that she meant no harm. And then the rest of the squatters timidly began filing into the room after her. A couple of them carried guns of their own, but kept them lowered as the Snarlers did.

Javier had the irrational thought that the next person into the room was the man Mott had shot, but that man was dead. The reason for this impression was that the mutant's head was an impossible ruin, looking as though it had been run over with the tread of a construction robot. It was crushed into a half-flattened mass, with only one eye showing through the rubbery folds that twisted the mouth into a drool-slicked hole. More like a crumpled Halloween mask than something with a skull, let alone a brain, inside it.

"This is Nick," Mira said.

The Choom man who followed Nick crawled into the room on all fours, like some giant white spider. He was naked but for a pair of filthy shorts, his bony body making him look as though he were in the terminal stage of starvation. His strangely bent stick limbs each had two extra joints, and it appeared that his too-long fingers were supernor-mally jointed, as well. A wispy-haired head wove like that of a cobra atop a slender neck twice as long as it should have been. The young man smiled shyly at pretty Nhu. In his hollow, wasted face, his already broad Choom mouth seemed a death's head grin. Nhu had seen a lot of mutants and non-human beings in her young years, but something about this man's eerie movements made her shiver. She quickly looked away.

Mira introduced him. "This is Haanz."

Another woman came shambling in, hefty and wheezing, a too-small dirty gray sweat suit straining to contain her bulk. Javier counted five faces of varying sizes crowded onto her single shaggy-haired skull. Oddly, the one normal-sized face appeared insensate, its mouth drooping and eyes rolled up white. Only two of the smaller, rudimentary faces appeared to be cognizant, with sharp, alert eyes. One of the three dead faces was positioned upside-down, with hair trailing from its scalp to partially obscure the half-formed suggestion of a sixth face. "Barbie," said Mira.

Finally came the owner of the angry voice. He too resembled some giant insect, though black and bipedal, stalking in like a mantis with a soft pneumatic hiss. He was little more than a black man's bald head perched on a stubby, grub-like blob of a body, harnessed into a cybernetic frame. Javier had seen badly wounded war veterans reduced to moving about in this sort of mechanical "pony," though in this man's case his limbless state was obviously congenital. His mother had either not wanted him aborted, when obstetrical scanning disclosed his anomaly, or she had been too poor to have received advanced medical care at all. Orange flames had been stenciled onto the sides of the open thorax that held his nude little body in place, and decals had been pasted on the pony's skeletal limbs, but the machine had seen better days; one arm was silver instead of black, with a different sort of claw hand-a replacement part. The other arm gripped a big Decimator .220 revolver in its fist.

"I'm Satin," he introduced himself, his eyes moving over the Snarlers with a challenging menace.

"And this is Hollis," Mott said, sweeping his arm at the dead man on the floor between them.

"Yeah? Well our friend Chang is in there with his throat shot out." Satin flicked his head back over his little nub of a shoulder.

"Wanker shouldn't have been so trigger happy!" Tiny Meat said.

"Enough," Javier said. "None of us are happy what happened to our friends. But I think we can agree that the real problem is out there." He pointed his pistol toward the window.

"What are you doing here?" Big Meat asked the mutants.

"Like we said, we're squatters," Mira told him.

"We're the Tin Town Terata," Satin elaborated proudly. "The Triple Ts."

"Yeah, nice alliteration," Patryk muttered.

"So you're a gang, too," Javier noted. "That was your insignia outside, in green? Not smart, putting it there. You were begging the forcers to see it and come in here to investigate."

"It was there to warn other gangs that this is our place now."

"But now you want to leave," Mott snorted.

"Funny, our two gangs both coming to this same place, here in money land," Javier said.

Mira replied, "Not so unusual, when you're talking about a big abandoned building. We were surprised there weren't any other squatters already in here. Until we found a homeless man in one of the hallways. What was left of him, anyway, after they were done with him."

"But how do Tin Town mutants find their way to Beaumonde Street?"

"There was a war," Mira confessed. "The other mutie gang was bigger. The only way out for us was to escape Tin Town. Some of our enemies kept chasing us, so we had to go further and further, until they stopped chasing. We finally got on a train, and got off the train here. Before the war there were thirty-one of us. Sixteen of us made it to the train." She swept her arm at her friends. "Now we're five. The Blank People got the others, before we were able to lock them all outside." "God," Tabeth moaned.

"What are you doing here?" Nick mumbled, his wet words barely decipherable.

"Our friend you say was put into the trash zap-per," Javier answered. "He came out to Beaumonde looking for his girlfriend, and he didn't come back. We tracked him here."

"Why would the trash zapper do that to him?" Nhu asked dubiously.

"The same reason the Blank People killed all the pig-hens they caught on the roof," Mira said. "The same reason they killed that homeless man. And why they're trying to kill us. I think it's because they see us all as pests. Pests to be exterminated."

"And the trash zapper thinks the same way?"

"The zapper and the Blank People must've been programmed to recognize and take action against us undesirable types," Satin growled.

"Undesirable is right," Nhu whispered to Tabeth. More loudly she said, "It still doesn't make sense, with a trash zapper."

"So what the blast are these Blank People, anyway?" Javier asked. He wandered closer to the window, now trusting that the Tin Town Terata would not shoot him in the back as he did so. He had to fight his own reluctance to near the window, however, reminding himself again and again that the things could not see them through the one-way tinting. But was that true? Who knew what senses they relied on? A kind of sonar, like the blind Waiai race, that could penetrate the bulletproof pane?

"Androids," Big Meat stated.

"No," said Mira. "They're not mechanical, anyway. They just have a chip in their heads. The rest is all organic. We know-we put the bodies of the ones we killed in apartment 6-B."

"And we've been putting the bodies of our dead friends in apartment 5-B," Satin added. "That's where we'll put Chang. I suggest you start using apartment 4-B." He nodded down at Hollis.

Mott squeezed his gun's handle tighter. "What do you mean, 'start?'"

Mira glanced up at Satin. "We've got to all work together here, Satin. Right?"

"This is easy enough," Tabeth said, pacing nervously, and digging a hand phone out of her jacket's pocket. "We just call the forcers down here to get us out past those gray things."

"Yeah! Of course!" Nhu lifted her arm, on which she wore a new-stolen-wrist comp like a bracelet.

Javier blinked at them a few moments before he said, slowly as if speaking to far younger children, "Think for a minute, if that's possible. We call the forcers to this building in rich old Beaumonde Square, where our two gangs are inside with guns in our hands and a room full of dead mutants? And a couple of people with bullet holes in them?" He motioned toward Hollis. "And I bet more than one of us has go some illegal substances on 'em, am I right? Dung, girls, we'd be going from this prison to another prison."

"Javier's right," Tiny Meat said. "We're the Folger Street Snarlers. Since when do we need to go crying to the forcers for help? We'll fight our way out of this-right, Big?" He slapped the shoulder of his larger twin, who presently carried him in the crook of one arm.

"We can try," Satin said. "But I hope you got enough ammo, little fella. There's twelve apartments to a floor, and three floors, and two wings. And there's one of those Blank People for every single apartment."

"So how many does that make?" Tiny Meat said.

"That makes seventy-two of them," Patryk replied softly. For a few moments, nobody said anything.

The body of the mutant named Chang was carried to apartment 5, here on the ground floor of B-Wing, by Patryk and Nick, escorted by Tabeth and Barbie with guns in their hands. Patryk held his breath when the door slid into the wall and the stench of the makeshift morgue rolled over him. Tabeth hung back in the hallway and stifled a retch. Patryk saw indistinct forms crudely wrapped in clear plastic tarps the mutants had scrounged from somewhere in the building. Some of the forms were on the small side-either creatures like Mira, or else the Blank People had made themthat small.

Next, this same crew carried Hollis into apartment 4-B, as Satin had facetiously suggested. They laid him on the floor, all out of tarps to wrap him in. They'd already taken his pistol and ammo, and a candy bar they'd found in a jacket pocket to add to the food Javier was pooling together, but now Barbie pointed at the corpse, and two of the supernumerary faces on the side of her skull rasped in unison, "We should take his jacket. It's cold in here."

"I wouldn't do that if I was you," Patryk advised her. "That's a Snarler jacket. Mott or Tiny Meat see one of you Teratas in that and Javier might not be able to stop 'em in time."

Barbie nodded, seeing his point. They left Hollis in the room, looking very alone on the barren floor, devoid of all furniture, but the door slid shut to close off the image.

The others had abandoned apartment 12-B where Hollis and Chang had died, as much to escape the blood on the floor as those two Blank People still lingering at the window. Looking back at them as he left the room, Javier said, "I don't think they're trying to get in, now. I think they're just reminding us that they're out there."

They all moved to the room in which the Terata had set up their own little camp: apartment 1-B, just off the front lobby that bridged the two wings of Steward Gardens. In 1-B there were some chairs and couches that the Terata had stolen from that lobby, on which they had since been sleeping. Glancing around at the other items the squatters had salvaged from here and there, Mott whispered to Tiny Meat, "I don't think these last five are the toughest, and that's why they're still alive. Dung! Look at them. The only reason they're still alive is the Blank People probably killed off the best fighters first. The only one of these sad fucks that I'd be worried about is that Satan bastard."

"Satin," Big Meat corrected. "You two remember what Javier said. Our gangs aren't at war; we've got to team up against these Blank People."

"Shut up," Tiny Meat told his brother. "Were we talking to you?"

"Listen," Mott said to Big Meat, "I hate to say this, but Javier's getting soft in his old age. How does he know these freaks didn't kill Brat themselves, like they did Hollis, even if it was just by accident? More believable if they'd said those Blank Fucks got him, instead of that trash zapper story."

Javier swept together the small store of edibles he had gathered from his crew. He saw the mutants all glancing at it as if it were a steaming, aromatic buffet. "What have you folks been eating?"

"We had some food with us when we started out, because we knew we'd be out of Tin Town for a while," said Mira. "But it's almost gone now. We found a pig-hen in one of the rooms; it must've flown in before we sealed everything off. So we ate that, yesterday." In a lower voice, she admitted, "We were talking about, you know, maybe having to eat our friends. I know that sounds crazy, but…"

"I understand."

"Anyway, first I suggested we try eating one of the Blank People. They are organic. Though in a way, that sounds even more terrible."

"I don't think we'll have to resort to that," Javier reassured her. "How long have you folks been trapped inside here, anyway?"

"Eleven days."

"Dung," he said, wagging his head.

"So," Nhu pointed at the humble pile of food, some of it purchased at Quidd's Market only hours earlier, "we divide up our food, and the Teratas ration their own stuff, right?"

"No," Javier said. "It all goes in one pot."

"There's too many of us all together!" she protested.

"Well that's the way it's going to be, until we get out of here. Clear? Anybody gets caught sneaking into it, and I don't care if you're a Snarler or a Terata, you'll be eating my bullets instead. Trust me. I'm going to put Patryk in charge of the food."

"Oh, you are, huh?" Satin said. But Mira reached up and put a hand on one of the flippers that would have been a leg, to reassure him. Still, Satin asked, "And why him?"

Javier shrugged. "Because he's got a backpack. And because he does what he's told."

"What about water?" Nhu asked.

"There's running water," Mira said. "And this place is self-sufficient for power. It must have its own generator system in the basement."

Nhu headed into the little kitchen unit of 1-B. "A nice place like this, there has to be a food fabricator."

Mira followed after her, waddling quickly. "I wouldn't do that if I was you."

Nhu flicked on a light, glanced around her, moved to a control strip set into a faux black marble counter top. "Is there anything still in the fabricator stores? Did you try?"

"Of course we tried, but."

Nhu started tapping the keys without waiting for the tiny woman to finish. A screen lit up, showed a menu of meals the fabricator could create from the generic soup in its banks (a raw material that consisted largely of fermented bacteria). She punched up something simple: imitation chili con carne. After a hesitation, then the sound of rushing air, there was a gurgling and a tray was pushed out of the processing unit onto the counter. In a ceramic bowl fizzed a foamy black sludge that smelled like pond algae.

"Oh, wow," Nhu said, cupping a hand over her nose and mouth.

"It's gone bad," Mira said.

"How long has this place been abandoned, then?"

"Well, I think the soup sat in the banks but never got used," Mira replied. "Because I don't think this building was abandoned. It seems to me like it never even opened in the first place."